Issue: Volume 8, Issues 3-4

José Franco-Chasán, The Reception of Positivism in Spain: Pedro Dorado Montero (Springer, 2023). $159.99 (paperback). 226 pages. Victorian jurist Sir Henry Sumner Maine is purported to have said that “nobody cares about the criminal law except theorists and habitual criminals.” Probably even fewer people care about the intellectual history of criminal law—habitual criminals not being known…

During the previous Congress, some commentators called on the Senate Judiciary Committee, then controlled by Democrats and chaired by Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, to demand the testimony of Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito over allegations of ethical breaches, securing their presence by subpoena if necessary.[1] The Committee did not subpoena the…

Editor’s Note: Jürgen Dinkel’s article, “‘The Rich Uncle from America’: Transnational Inheritance Transfers between the United States, Germany, and Russia, 1840s–1980s,” appeared in Law and History Review 43, no. 3 (August 2025). Dr. Dinkel’s second book, All Remains in the Family: Inheritance and Property in Germany, Russia, and the United States since the 19th Century…

In 2008 the Supreme Court ruled that the term “bear arms,” in the Second Amendment, did not refer only to the carrying of arms in an organized militia but to “the right of a citizen to bear arms in defense of himself and the state.”  Among the many arguments posed by the Court in reaching…